Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. — Carl Sandburg

What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing? — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. — Carl Sandburg

Our lives are like a candle in the wind. — Carl Sandburg

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. — Carl Sandburg

Life is an onion–you peel it year by year and sometimes cry. — Carl Sandburg

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. — Carl Sandburg

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies. — Carl Sandburg

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it. — Carl Sandburg

Such a Big miracle in such a tiny baby. Big things often have small beginnings A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. — Carl Sandburg

Life goes before we know what it is. / One fool is enough in any house. / Even God gets tired of too much hallelujah. / Take it easy and live long as brothers. — Carl Sandburg

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life. — Carl Sandburg

What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly. — Carl Sandburg

Why did he write to her, ‘I can’t live without you?’ And why did she write to him ‘I can’t live without you?’ For he went west and she went east and they both lived. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

I have written some poetry that I don’t understand myself. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild–duck migration. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb–prints of dust, blood, dreams. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a fossil rock–print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke–stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a fresh morning spider–web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck–and–wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead–marches. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross–lights, and moon wisps. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language. — Carl Sandburg

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes. — Carl Sandburg

Have I, have you, been too silent? Is there an easy crime of silence? — Carl Sandburg

To know silence perfectly is to know music. — Carl Sandburg

And the Sphinx broke its long silence: ‘Don’t expect too much. — Carl Sandburg

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower. — Carl Sandburg

There is only one child in the world and the Child’s name is All Children. — Carl Sandburg

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on. — Carl Sandburg

What is there more of in the world than anything else? Ends. — Carl Sandburg

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child’s name is All Children. — Carl Sandburg

Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want. — Carl Sandburg

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders. — Carl Sandburg

I am the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? — Carl Sandburg

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe. — Carl Sandburg

Love your neighbor as yourself but don’t take down your fence. — Carl Sandburg

Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace. — Carl Sandburg

Poetry is a type–font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death. — Carl Sandburg

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out. — Carl Sandburg

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it is never written till long afterward. — Carl Sandburg

And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist. — Carl Sandburg

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are. — Carl Sandburg

Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star. — Carl Sandburg

So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants. — Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love. — Carl Sandburg

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all. — Carl Sandburg

Tell me if the lovers are losers… tell me if any get more than the lovers. — Carl Sandburg

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering. — Carl Sandburg